Sunday, July 31, 2011

As you may recall, there have been several occurrences here in the US over the past few years of young parents neglecting their children in the name of online gaming. One mother, 22-year-old Alexandra Tobias, from Jacksonville, Florida, was actually charged with the murder of her 3-month-old son Dylan Lee, after shaking him to death for interrupting her Farmville session; a particularly senseless crime given what an awful game Farmville is.

Well, while Tobias may continue to hold her crown as the worst offender in this rather odd sub-genre of parental neglect. A young couple from Dongguan, China, have managed to score a unique achievement of their own, by being the first set of parents, that I know of anyway, to actually sell their three children in order to support their online gaming habit.

According to the Sanxiang City News, Li Lin and Li Juan, both of whom are under the age of 21, met in 2007 and quickly bonded over their obsession for online games. A year later, they welcomed their first child, a son, by promptly leaving him home alone just a few days after his birth in order to go gaming at an Internet cafe some 18 miles away.

By 2009, the couple had a second child together, a daughter this time. But rather than merely neglecting her like they did their first born, Lin and Juan decided it would be a much better idea to sell her, and use the proceeds to fund their online activities.

But as you may well know, battling Orcs and Warlocks in an online fantasy land isn't cheap, and the profits gained from the sale of their second child, nearly 500 dollars, were soon all used up. So the young parents took the only logical path available to them and soon decided to sell their first born son as well, who, at a sticker price of around 4600 dollars, brought in nearly 10 times as much as his little sister.

Li Lin and Li Juan would go on to repeat this act one final time with the sale of their third child, another boy, who was born sometime later and sold for the same amount as his brother, before they were finally turned into the authorities by Lin's mother. When asked after their arrests weather or not they missed their children, Li Lin and Li Juan, who claim they did not know they were breaking the law, responded;

"We don’t want to raise them, we just want to sell them for some money.”

Well, at least they're honest I guess, terrible examples of human beings who should have their reproductive organs violently removed, but honest.